 Great photo by Meta AI. “Patch” can mean a lot of things. Patch of grass. Soul patch. Patch cord. Bald patch. We could go on.
Here, though, we’re talking about marketing and advertising. And the idea of a patch—which we’ll define in detail in just a minute—is an oldie but goodie you may have overlooked. It’s so simple and so obvious that it’s easy to take for granted, and thus miss. Let us explain by way of the true client story that sparked this article. We recently were helping a client to create a promotional package for a speaker’s bureau, to get them booked at lots of different live engagements targeting their specialized audience. And we needed to flesh out this package with a “sizzle reel” of their past live engagements: Video clips. Now this client had been on stage a lot. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was precious little video to document it. We needed every shot, heck, every frame we could get our hands on. And then we found it. What looked like a veritable little silver mine. It was a short clip, but boy was it juicy. It showed our client on stage, in front of a big crowd, delivering some real rousing zingers. It was great! But this silver mine was tarnished. First, it wasn’t created by our client. It was created by someone else who had either organized that event or maybe was in the audience. We found it on YouTube. This created Challenge 1: Find that person and ask/beg/plead/cajole/bargain for permission to use/edit/re-purpose it. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. A quick Googling led us to the poster’s website, and thus to their email address, and they were delightfully generous, to the point of even directing us toward a higher-resolution version of the video clip. Now isn’t that nice? But then there’s Challenge 2. That video was stamped. Right across the lower third, it read “[Speaker Name] of ABC Company, Speaking at XYZ Event 2019.” Oh no! The “[Speaker Name]” was correct; that was our client. But “ABC Company” no longer existed; the client had since changed the name, after, um, 2019, which made this clip look positively ancient. Naturally—since of course you’re thinking of this—we’d asked the original poster of the video (the one who’d granted us access, and the higher-res version) if they had a pristine copy of the source video, with no titles stamped on top. And no, they did not. How do you solve Challenge 2? It’s right in the title of this article: You patch it. You basically build a new title bar, and overlay it on top of the outdated/offensive one. Don’t try and match the style of the old one; why bother? You want this to look intentional, as if that “title” was your idea, and was there all along—not like you’re trying to cover some mistake. Oh, did we mention Challenge 3? Turns out that the original poster had added background music to this video of our client, on stage, speaking. When it rains, it pours. You can’t patch your way out of that one. Fortunately, however, you can somewhat reduce “background noise” (!) in editing, and we’d had our own up-tempo music track for the sizzle reel, which we used to help drown out the old music. Patching, like this, applies to lots of media. You’ve likely seen tons of patches in your life and never ever realized it. They work on TV spots, print ads, web pages, brochures, trade show banners, infomercials, you name it. The only limit is your creativity. Need a creative solution to a tricky marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
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 Great photo by Meta AI. Pay attention. This is a good one.
It’s based on a true story which we’ll naturally anonymize, but let the lessons-learned shine through bright and clear. Because you can apply them, easily. And make more money, doing so. A persistent business-development problem is the search for new leads. An equally persistent biz-dev truth is that ice-cold leads are the hardest to reach. Whereas upsells, cross-sells, and especially referrals represent the lowest-hanging fruit. Ignore that low-hanging fruit at your peril. But you knew that. Right? Not so fast. Imagine “the tree of invisible fruit.” It’s growing right in your backyard. Allow us to explain. Not too long ago, we needed to find a new vendor—let’s say it’s a graphic artist—for one of our clients. There are many ways to do this. You can search on gig platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. Heck, you can check reviews on Yelp. But there’s an interesting parallel here to the biz-dev challenge we’d just described. Doing an ice-cold search on, say, Fiverr can certainly yield good results. But it takes a lot of work and time, and you need to trust the reviews posted by the graphic artists themselves. Finding ice-cold vendors is just like finding ice-cold biz-dev leads. See where this is going? If you do, then think two steps ahead. Again, let us explain: While you can certainly scour the gig-economy platforms for that new vendor, wouldn’t it be easier to simply get a referral from someone you know, trust, and respect? Of course it is. So it’s the obvious path to follow. Obviously, you can—and we did—reach out to your network. Sure, you can ask vendors in your network to recommend other vendors: That video editor may well know a good graphic artist. Totally fine. But what if you also reach out to your network of clients? Or better yet, recent/cool/lukewarm clients? Past clients? Heck, ancient clients! We did exactly this, when we’d needed to find that new graphic artist. And we can’t recommend the process enough. Sure, it was a fun trip down memory lane, re-connecting with old clients from years gone by. Know what else it was? It was Step Two that we’d just hinted at, above. Let’s be very clear about this: We were on a mission. We absolutely needed to find a new graphic artist for our current client. So we weren’t pitching our services, at all, when we reached out to all of these former clients. But still. As soon as they heard from us, they connected us to the work we’d done for them in the past which, we’re happy to report, was all good. And so it should come as zero surprise to you that more than a few of those conversations went something like this: “Hey! Nice to hear from you again. No, I don’t have a graphic artist to recommend right now, but I’ll keep my eyes open for you in case I find one. Still, I’m glad you called. Think you could help with this challenge my team is currently facing…?” It’s the no-sell sell. Granted, you can’t do this every day, but when the opportunity genuinely arises, it beats the heck out of Fiverr. Need help with a biz-dev challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Perfect image—replete with appropriately inappropriate cleavage—by Grok. You might wonder what we here at Copel Communications—who daily toil in the trenches of executive-focused B2B messaging on behalf of our august clientele—have in common with those purveyors of click-bait ads that crowd your screen when you’re invariably trying to read something else.
You know what we’re talking about. Headlines, photos, and clickable tiles all doing their best to tempt you with teasers such as:
Admit it. You’ve clicked on some. Despite your deepest-held belief that it wasn’t worth your time. And you were always right. You swore them off, just as you’d had back in college on a bleary Sunday morning: “I’ll never have another drink again in my life.” Yet there they are. Thriving on with virus-like invulnerability, despite the evolution of ad blockers, AI, and your own conviction to avoid them. Because they’re so juicy. They promise so much to your can’t-hold-it-back lizard brain. Okay. Let’s pivot back to B2B. This story actually has, believe it or not, a point. Marketing and advertising--any marketing and advertising, regardless of how buttoned-down and high-end—has a simple goal: Make that target audience sit up and take action. Oooh. How do we get them to “sit up”? No, we’re not espousing the use of salacious images or language (want to have fun? scroll through a page of click-bait ads and count the instances of cleavage leaping out at you, LOL!). But there is a lesson—a valuable lesson—that can be applied, from click-bait, directly to the C-suite. Those click-bait ads persist, despite all the obstacles we’d listed above, for one simple reason: They work. They generate clicks. And eyeballs. And revenue. They’re as American as apple pie. What then, is this “valuable lesson”? It’s simple. Learn from the power of click-bait. Leverage it. You needn’t dumb it down; for goodness’ sake, it’s already at rock-bottom. But you can smarten it up. Aha. Each click-bait ad is tempting because of the secret it hides, and the promise it dangles. Those are universal truths. Consider this headline which we just made up: Logistics executives are rapidly implementing this new automated reporting solution What’s the secret? The solution. What’s the promise? Learn what it is. What’s the lizard-brain button being pushed: Good ol’ FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. It doesn’t really look like a click-bait headline… until you parse it the way we just did. Whaddya know? Lesson learned. Lesson applied. Need help with your next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Tremendous photo by Grok. If you’re reading this, you’re targeting executives as part of your business. Read on. And learn.
We were once directing a young video editor, in a Zoom call, about how to approach a project we’d handed him: a script for an exec-focused video. Our client wanted to be on this call, too, and kept mentioning that we wanted to be at “C-level.” We saw the look on this kid’s face. And quickly realized: Oh my goodness. He thinks our client is saying “sea-level.” We were right. He couldn’t figure out what the video had to do with being submerged in the ocean. Once we explained it to him--“C”-level and not “sea”-level—he understood his marching orders better, and went on to deliver a perfectly good video for us. But back to your challenge: Marketing to executives with purchasing power. Sure, we can embrace some basic tenets here. This isn’t about flashy images or breathless claims. The tone should befit the audience. And of course you want to convey the value of what you’re offering, whether it’s a product or a service. Those are fairly given. But here’s what isn’t: We recently produced a marketing piece for a client of ours which was showcased on a global media platform (can you tell we’re being cagey here? we need to be). This piece we created was exposed to literally billions of people. Checking the metrics on it after it had been published a while, we saw that it had garnered just 300 views. Failure? Nope. Success. Deeper diving showed that it had reached exactly whom we’d wanted it to. Execs. In other words: This is a small audience. Remember the quote “Speak to the target. Let the others listen”? It certainly applies here. Unlike mass-market approaches, this is not a quantity game. It’s a quality game. And here we’ve learned, from some of our incredibly astute clients, some interesting, if counterintuitive, tips:
So if that executive leader is looking to advance their strategic roadmap via automated decisioning, you’d better 1) know it, and 2) say it. This is a very subtle and nuanced challenge, that you shouldn’t entrust to a junior writer or AI. The stakes are high, and you’ve only got one chance to get it right. Need help? Contact us. We work on these kinds of projects—sorry, “initiatives”—all the time.  Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently completed the sixth revision of a project we were working on for a client. And boy was it fun!
No. We are not being sarcastic. We’re serious as a heart attack here. So what gives? And how can this be the basis for an article? More to the point, what can you take away from this story? How can it make you more productive? Happier? Once the bones are in place… We can’t tell you too many details about the project itself, because it’s confidential/protected by NDA. But we can say that it was an internal written piece, very important, that would be shared across the organization, and eventually re-jiggered into a prospect-facing piece, to help drive sales. So it was a very important document. And our client was understandably maniacal about the thing, sending us change after change after change. It was a real revisions hamster-wheel. But by the fifth round, the client had run out of new ideas and tweaks. The ideas, the tenets of the piece, were fixed. The bones were in place. And so it was our turn to create Draft Six. And yes, it was actually fun. Why? In praise of polishing At this point, since the facts of the content were locked, Draft Six became an entirely stylistic challenge. It was 100-percent “polish this document.” We didn’t have to worry about getting new material tossed out wholesale by the client because new quirks and features had crept in. In other words, we could happily roll up our sleeves, and dive into making the English better. (Did you know that Google will ding your website if you use AI-generated copy? As a prime purveyor of AI, Google can recognize it better than anyone, and since their goal is to serve their users with trustworthy content, they seek out human-written material, vs. stuff that had been created by clicking the “Generate” button.) As you might’ve guessed by now, we certainly didn’t use ChatGPT to “polish” this document. We had the luxury of reading passages aloud, consulting a thesaurus, testing out different sentence structures and phrasing, and getting to the point where it was so tight that it squeaked. It wasn’t hard. It was gratifying. It was like scratching an itch. And the piece just got better and better, the more we polished it. Mind you, we didn’t spend a week on what we just described. Creating Draft Six only took us an hour or two. But boy did it come out great, and the client was delighted, and to this day, that piece is doing its job, ably. The reason we tell this story is that it doesn’t just apply to this arcane document that we were working on, here at Copel Communications. It pertains to everything that you create, in your business, too. There’s always going to be the ideation phase. Then the creation phase, based on the vetted ideas. But too many people overlook the final polishing phase, which is when that piece really comes to life and shines. This is true for web pages, for product designs, for graphical layouts, for sales plans, you name it. The key here is recognizing the inflection point when the initial creation ends, and the polishing begins. Once you can spot it, you’ll be liberated to apply the best possible polish to whatever it is you’ve been working on, without that looming dread of “Oh, this will just get tossed because new input for Version 7 is on its way.” So enjoy your time in the black hole, with your email and text notifications disabled, as you polish away, knowing that you’ll emerge with a gem in your hand. Need some help ideating, creating, or polishing that next project? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. This is an article about producing B2B videos: the kind you post on YouTube to bring in prospects. In this story, it was actually about the slick home-page video we were creating for a client’s new website.
For these types of videos, the approach is usually pretty straightforward: You send off your approved two-column (“Video” and “Audio”) video script to your video editor, who does the rest. This includes finding stock footage and music, building titles, editing the footage, and farming our the voice-over or V.O. It’s that last part we want to talk about here. Sure, you can proceed the way we just described. But we don’t recommend it. Here’s why. We’ll use the case of our client, and their new website, as an example. For their new site, they were also updating their brand, and, more importantly, the audience they wanted to target. Specifically, they were going more upscale in their demographic. Very high-end. Sure, this was conveyed in the video script. And we could have entrusted our video editor (who is fantastic, by the way) to source the V.O. on his own. Instead, we worked with the client to produce the V.O. first, before sending the script to the editor. This gave us the advantage (“luxury”?) of casting that part ourselves, letting our client listen to audio samples of different V.O. artists, and then narrowing down to the final one. Then we were able to work with this voice-over artist very directly and intently, explaining to him the exact audience we were looking to target, the similar reads on his reel that would be relevant/close to what we wanted, the intended look and feel of the finished video, and so on. Armed with all of this info, that V.O. artist delivered. He nailed it. You could just see the gorgeous video it would accompany… even if that video hadn’t been created yet. Take 2 Now we could send that V.O. recording—along with the script, our client’s logo, and other files—along to our brilliant video editor. And think of this: Not only did our producing the V.O. (whose cost was ridiculously nominal, by the way) save our editor work and time, but it also provided killer input to help create a better video. All he had to do was listen to the thing. It helped him pick just the right background music—on the very first try! It helped him source the right stock-footage candidates, with minimal back-and-forth from us. We knew, all along, how this video was supposed to come out. That’s our job. It was tougher for our client to visualize in advance; that’s neither their job nor their skill-set. But boy were they delighted when the final product came together. And note that nothing mentioned above increased the production budget of this video. It was simply a matter of choosing to sequence it in this way which elevated its production value so much, and so efficiently. Have a creative project you need help with? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in.  Great photo by Grok. We had a client who recently showed us a whole new program they were going to present to their clients and new prospects alike.
It was well thought-out. It was super detailed. It had lots of impressive features. It promised to deliver a ton of value and ROI. And it was terrifying. Who sees what—and when This may seem contradictory, if not counterintuitive. Here it is, we’d just lauded this new program which our client had created and unveiled to us. And then we undercut that review with the dreaded T-word. What gives? We can give you a little more detail now, and you’ll certainly say “Ohhhh…!” Our client—like many business owners—lives and breathes in spreadsheets. So that’s what they’d shared with us. Indeed, they screen-shared it with us. And this spreadsheet (was it Excel? was it Google? who cares?) was about 40 rows deep by about 25 columns across. All at once. Yep. Terrifying. The good news: We were the first, and only, ones to see it in this state. Our client was justifiably and understandably excited by the cool new program they’d worked so hard to develop. But boy was it ever un-exciting when presented as a swimming sea of spreadsheet cells. This is hardly a tragic story. And you likely can see exactly where it’s going, even if our client wasn’t able at the time. We patiently listened to the whole presentation, which took about a half hour. We took notes. And then we asked some pointed questions:
The idea was to turn down the spigot on this fire hose so it would better resemble a soda straw. The client—they’re very smart—immediately saw where we were going. Easier than you think Once our client realized that they needed to carve their presentation of this new program into bite-sized chunks, all that was left was the execution. And here we can describe a kind of MVP or minimum-viable-product version of that effort: Sure, the client could have gone on and created a snazzy new PowerPoint deck, with discrete slides for the different phases of this proposed program. But that would take time, effort, and resources—and at this point, the client really just wanted to test out this idea: socialize it with existing clients and see how receptive they’d be. So why even make a PowerPoint? The solution was even simpler: Tabs. Yep. That’s all they needed. If this program has five phases, then carve the spreadsheet into five clickable tabs. Simply screen-share a single tab when you present it. And if the conversation leads to a discussion of Phase Two, then click the Phase Two tab. Done. Steve Jobs famously said that simple is hard. But sometimes it’s hard to see what’s simple, and staring right at you. Do you really need to spend a fortune on a shiny new CRM (customer relationship management) platform when your Excel is still working fine? Of course not. Wait for the expense to be more than justified. Ditto for things like learning management systems or LMSs, or even slick PowerPoints as we’d described in this story. Have a marketing challenge that you suspect is simpler than it appears? Contact us and let us put a fresh set of eyes on it for you.  Great photo by Grok. In case you were unaware, here at Copel Communications, we alternate our blog articles between those directed toward business owners/consultants (at the top of the month), and our “creatives” audiences of ad agencies and other creative folk (at mid-month).
This article is one of the latter. And it begins with a story. A colleague called us up not long ago, bemoaning the fact that her creative agency (we’re obfuscating/anonymizing here) had seen a sudden drop in business, since all of her clients were switching to AI for their creative work. To say she was unhappy was an understatement; there was a distinct edge of panic in her voice. But was she right? And how does this story relate to you, and your business? Are the ubiquitous doom-and-gloom headlines correct? And what the heck is an “Upwork moment,” which we’d teased in the headline? Let’s unpack this part-by-part. They’re going where? A little more (fudged/anonymized) info about this colleague of ours. Her creative agency serves big you-know-them national brands. They’ve entrusted her and her great staff, for years, to deliver beautiful hand-crafted creative which elevates these brands to their respective audiences. Collectively, there’s billions of dollars of brand equity at stake here. Now ask yourself an obvious question: Are these huge brands suddenly asking ChatGPT to do the same thing for them? Yeah, we’re laughing, too. These huge brands know that ChatGPT can’t come close when it comes to quality. They also know that ChatGPT (or any other widget of its ilk) treads in very murky waters when it comes to copyright clearance. Do you honestly think that they’d risk their billion-dollar brands on that? Do you think that they would dump our colleague and her team, in order to get such sketchy and legally-questionable content… merely to save a few bucks? You think they don’t have “a few bucks”? Or is the answer perhaps far more mundane? Spoiler alert: It is. As we’d told our colleague: “This isn’t AI. It’s just a downturn. A basic dip in your business, wherein a few accounts happen to be slow at the exact same time.” You could hear her sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “That, I can deal with.” It was, in short, familiar territory. Solve-able via old-school tricks like shaking the trees and good old-fashioned business development or biz-dev. Beware the ostrich Does this mean that AI isn’t a threat, or at least a factor? Get your head out of the sand. It’s a real thing. But then again, so was Google. So was the internet. We’re still breathing. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. Which brings us back to our “Upwork moment.” Several years ago, back around 2013, Upwork and other gig-economy platforms, such as Fiverr, burst onto the scene. Many people predicted that they would rob us of all our work and that we here at Copel Communications would promptly go out of business. We’re still breathing. The sky is still blue above us. But Upwork and Fiverr are still here and thriving. So what gives? As it turns out, Upwork was a really great find for businesses who, say, wanted dirt-cheap copywriting and didn’t care too much about the quality. So if you wanted to hire a writer from India who would create a 2,000-word blog for 15 bucks, Upwork was a godsend. This did not put us out of business. All it did was to better delineate various strata of clients and providers—and we don’t interact with either of them. Our work is higher-end than that, and our clients are, too. If you’ve read this far into this article, 1) thanks, and 2) you’re likely in the same watertight boat. Which gets back to AI. Sure, there are tons of people, worldwide, for whom AI/ChatGPT-generated content is good enough, and you certainly can’t beat the price. That is, free. For them, it’s a godsend. For us—and for you, and for our now-breathing-again colleague—it’s just another way the rest of the landscape is evolving around us. The sky ain’t falling tomorrow, either. Have a comment? Leave it in the comments below, or feel free to contact us directly.  Great photo by Grok. Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing?
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. But first, the genesis of this story. As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. But how? There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 1. The actual title of the video. 2. The YouTube description of the video Let’s review each. 1. The title We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first. It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 2. The description Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. The search engines like stuff like that. Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser?
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy!
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! |